Atlanta’s Story – 1940-1970
www.atlantacivilrights.org
The strategies and tactics used by African American leaders in Atlanta to galvanize black voting
power, gain access to public facilities and institutions, and increase economic opportunities for
African Americans offer a valuable perspective on the uniqueness of Atlanta’s Civil Rights
experience during the period 1940 to 1970. The core of that uniqueness resides in the
fundamental role that churches, social organizations, businesses, and other institutions of Auburn
Avenue, and the colleges and universities of the Atlanta University Center, played in developing
black leadership. While African American leaders traditionally have emerged from institutions in
their communities, the confluence of the businesses and institutions of “Sweet Auburn” with the
Historically Black Colleges and Universities of the city – Atlanta University, Spelman College,
Morris Brown College, Clark College, Morehouse College, and the Interdenominational
Theological Center – created an infrastructure for activism that was unparalleled.
This site explores, in summary, the role of these two factors in shaping Atlanta’s civil rights
history, which can be understood as having gone through four related phases:
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Phase One: Gradualism and Negotiation (1940-1949)
Phase Two: Retrenchment and Redirection (1950-1959)
Phase Three: Direct Action and Integration (1960-1965)
Phase Four: The Quest for Black Power (1966-1970)
It is worth noting at the outset, however, that across this time period the goals of the civil rights
movement in Atlanta did not change. There was a consistent and clarion call to educate and
register eligible African American voters, a demand for access to public and private opportunities
on par with the access afforded Atlanta’s white community, and there was a call for equal
protection under the law.
However, as tactics changed over time, a corresponding change in perspective occurred: civil
rights were increasingly seen as basic human rights applicable to all peoples — no matter where
they may be.
As noted above, the role of organizations on Auburn Avenue and the role of faculty and, most
profoundly, students in the Atlanta University Center were unique features of the city’s
movement. Despite a period of decline on Auburn Avenue beginning in the 1970s and challenges
in the Atlanta University Center at the beginning of the 21st century, these communities continue
to serve as incubators for African American leadership.
In 2000, 40 years after participants in the Atlanta student movement issued “An Appeal for
Human Rights,” a second appeal was put forth by former members of the Committee on Appeal
for Human Rights (COHAR) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
united with current student leaders in the Atlanta University Center. They called upon Atlanta to
confront old problems, such as voter apathy and economic inequalities, and to face the new
challenges of the city’s increasingly diverse population — from high dropout rates in the schools
to homelessness to crime in the streets. Their rallying cry is compelling:
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In past years, we, as African Americans, have resisted the assaults against our persons, our
dignity, our rights, our liberties and our very survival through resolute solidarity among our
community groups and institutions. We must do so now again. We must commit our intellect and
energies across lines of geography, age, sex, economic and social station in order to secure for all
citizens the guarantees of the United States Constitution. (Banks AUC Digest Online)
The civil rights movement in Atlanta does indeed live on.
Gradualism and Negotiation (1940-1949)
This discussion of the civil rights movement in Atlanta begins with the decade 1940-1949, for it
was during that period that the city's African American leadership systematically created and
mobilized a united black electorate to engage in an ongoing battle for social change. In the face of
overt racism, discrimination, and hostility against African Americans of the city, black leaders
decided that they could best accomplish their goal through gradualism — slow, deliberate steps
— rather than by drastic change. Most often, this gradual change was achieved through
negotiations between the black leadership and those with influence in the city's white political
power structure.
For Atlanta's black leadership, two major issues shaped the beginning of this era: apathy among
African American voters and problems with Atlanta's all-white police force. In 1940, African
Americans comprised 30 percent of the city's population, but less than five percent of them were
registered to vote. John Wesley Dobbs, the African American leader dubbed “the mayor of
Auburn Avenue,” said of the black community: “We are asleep at the switch.” (Pomerantz, 126)
The apathy among Atlanta's African American voters in the early 1940s was in large measure a
reaction to efforts to disfranchise and terrorize them that started during Reconstruction.
Voting rights undercut
During Radical Reconstruction (1867-1877) almost 100,000 African American men registered to
vote in Georgia. These newly franchised Black Georgians elected thirty-two African American
men to the Georgia legislature, but white legislators expelled them after only two months. The
black legislators were reinstated in 1870, but when Reconstruction ended, state laws were
instituted to undercut voting rights guaranteed to African American men by the 14th and 15th
Amendments to the U.S. Constitution (women would not be given the right to vote until 1920
with passage of the 19th Amendment).
A cumulative poll tax instituted in 1877 required that white and black men between 21 and 60
years of age pay a sum of money for every year since their twenty-first birthday, or since the law
took effect. While some black men might have had the economic wherewithal to pay the poll tax,
it was much more difficult to prepare for the vaguely defined and arbitrarily applied literacy and
citizenship requirements of a 1908 state constitutional amendment. In addition to these measures,
at the end of the nineteenth century, the Georgia Democratic Party—the party in control of
government in the state—began to prohibit African Americans from voting in state primaries. In
the early 1940s, all of these measures continued to severely restrict black voting, and thus black
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political strength, in Georgia.
The ever-present danger of racial terrorism during the Jim Crow era dissuaded many black
Atlantans from using the limited voting rights they had. “Jim Crow” embodied laws and practices
upheld segregation and racial discrimination in the South from 1883 until the passage of federal
legislation in the mid-1960s. During this time, white hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and
the Columbians physically intimidated and killed African Americans not only for attempting to
vote, but also for having economic power and social standing within the community. Thousands
of African American women and men throughout the South were lynched, and their murderers
were rarely prosecuted. In Georgia, there were 492 racially-motivated murders of African
American women and men between 1882 and 1968, according to statistics of the Archives at
Tuskegee Institute. That number placed the state second only to Mississippi, where 539 black
people are known to have been lynched during the same time period.
Indelibly etched in the collective memory of black Atlantans of the 1940s were recollections of
previous acts of racial terrorism. One of the bloodiest was the 1906 Atlanta Riot in which 25
African Americans and one white man were killed. The riot was ignited, in part, by rumors and
unsubstantiated newspaper stories about sexual assaults on white women by black men published
in the Atlanta Constitution and Atlanta Journal. But the flames were fanned by the anti-black
rhetoric of the Georgia gubernatorial campaign in which future Governor Hoke Smith warned it
was “folly for us to neglect any means within our reach to remove the present danger of Negro
domination.” (Harmon 10)
It was the fear of “Negro rule” that fueled racial terrorism, according to anti-lynching crusader
Ida B. Wells-Barnett. “The real purpose of these savage demonstrations is to teach the Negro that
in the South he has no rights that the law will enforce,” she had written in her pamphlet Lynch
Law in Georgia in 1899 after a series of gruesome murders near Atlanta.
Voter indifference persists
Despite the laws and threats of racial violence, for brief periods in 1919 and 1921, leaders such as
the Rev. A.D. Williams, head of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s grandfather; community organizer and educator
Lugenia Burns Hope; educator Charles L. Harper; and Atlanta Independent newspaper editor
Benjamin Davis successfully rallied black voting power to force the city to build Atlanta's first
black public secondary school, Booker T. Washington High School. In 1940, another show of
African American voting strength defeated a bond for education that would have short-changed
black schools in the city. Generally, however, in the years before the burgeoning of the civil
rights movement in Atlanta, legal and illegal roadblocks in the path of black voters made them
believe the electoral process was not a realistic way for African Americans to acquire civil rights.
In the early 1940s, this attitude worked against efforts such as those of Lugenia Burns Hope's
Neighborhood Union and Frankie V. Adams in the Atlanta University School of Social Work as
they attempted to improve the quality of life for impoverished black citizens. Even W.E.B. Du
Bois, an Atlanta University sociologist and civil rights activist, found it difficult to maintain
support during this time as he revived the Atlanta Conferences, in which empirical data on the
status and conditions of African Americans in the city was presented as evidence of the effects of
racism and segregation. (Du Bois, 325)
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African American voter indifference made it difficult to shake Atlanta from its own indifference
toward the many inequities faced by African American citizens. But words penned in 1903 by a
younger Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk proved prophetic: “Today it makes little difference to
Atlanta, to the South, what the Negro thinks or dreams or wills. In the soul-life of the land he is
today, and naturally will long remain, unthought of, half forgotten; and yet when he does come to
think and will and do for himself — and let no man dream that day will never come — then the
part he plays will not be one of sudden learning, but words and thoughts he has been taught to
lisp in his race childhood.” (66)
Voter interest takes hold
The African American women and men who comprised the leadership of the Auburn Avenue
community and the Atlanta University Center called upon their most powerful words and
thoughts to end voter apathy during the 1940s. The local branch of the NAACP, the Atlanta
Urban League, Atlanta University, as well as a number of women's clubs and African American
fraternal organizations engaged in voter education and registration to place the black community
in a position to negotiate with the white power structure for a wide range of needed changes.
(Harmon, 14-15)
The efforts of these organizations received a boost from the 1944 United States Supreme Court
decision Smith v. Allright declaring white primaries unconstitutional. In 1946 the U.S. Supreme
Court ruling in Primus King v. State of Georgia outlawed Georgia’s white primary. These
decisions provided a legal foundation for the voter registration efforts of Atlanta's African
American leaders. Two other catalysts for ending black voter apathy during this period were the
abolishment of the poll tax and the reduction of the voting age in Georgia from 21 to 18. To
organize and direct voter registration efforts, attorney A.T. Walden and Atlanta Daily World
Editor C.A. Scott created the Fulton County Citizen's Democratic Club in 1944. Grace Towns
Hamilton, executive director of the Atlanta Urban League at the time, initiated demographic
surveys of the black community to assist in canvassing efforts.
In 1946, black leaders' determination to build enough voting strength to influence upcoming
elections led to the creation of the All Citizen's Registration Committee (ACRC) — a special
coalition committee formed under the local NAACP and directed by Atlanta University History
Professor Clarence Bacote. Long-standing organizations like the Atlanta Civic and Political
League, founded in 1934 by John Wesley Dobbs, and the To Improve Conditions (TIC) Club,
established by activist Ruby Blackburn, were reinvigorated by the removal of voting restrictions.
The Hungry Club, organized at the Butler Street YMCA under the leadership of Warren
Cochrane, was created to provide a forum for political discussions. A range of other organizations
and institutions were recruited to engage in voter education and registration. (Tuck, 63)
Under the banner of the ACRC, in the spring of 1946, organizations used a variety of tactics to
educate and register eligible African American voters. Churches sometimes designated Sunday
worship as “Citizenship Sunday,” at which time the minister encouraged the congregation to
register and vote. Black labor and civic organizations urged their members to register. Black
media — particularly WERD, the first African American commercial radio station, and C.A.
Scott's Atlanta Daily World — was used to rally eligible voters. Businesses encouraged their
employees to become registered voters. Former Atlanta University Professor George Towns
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(father of Grace Towns Hamilton) played a vital role in the efforts. African American public
school teachers — 82 percent of whom were women — played a significant role in educating
students and encouraging adults to vote: “If you can reach the child, you can reach the parent,”
affirmed teacher/activist Narvie Harris. (Nasstrom, 123) The campaign was so successful that
each day crowds of women and men waited hours in long lines outside the Fulton County
Courthouse to register to vote. To reduce the crowds, the Registrar's Office agreed to open on
Saturdays and even deploy a mobile registration station into black neighborhoods during the
week.
Voting power leads to political change
The impact of newly registered black voters was evidenced by the 1946 mid-term election for the
Fifth Congressional District seat. Helen Douglas Mankin was the only one of 19 white candidates
who sought the black vote, and as a result, she won the election. All of the candidates were
invited to meet with black leaders; Mankin was the only candidate who accepted that invitation.
As a result, her secret meeting with this constituency became a model for gradualism through
negotiation, which characterized the era. Even though the maneuverings of white supremacists
would prevent her from keeping her seat in the next election, Mankin's tactics and initial victory
provided a template for white politicians who wanted to garner support from Atlanta's black
community. Moreover, the well planned and executed get-out-the-vote strategy of black leaders
made it clear that the African American electorate was a force to be reckoned with.
Unfortunately, several events threatened to shake African American voting strength in the wake
of the Mankin victory. Unbeknownst to the black community in Atlanta at the time, the Ku Klux
Klan considered assassinating A.T. Walden for his leadership role in rallying African American
voters to support Mankin. But, for unknown reasons, the Klan never carried out the plan. (Allen,
10) Also, just days after the Mankin victory in July 1946, two young African American couples
were lynched, with at least 60 bullets fired into their bodies. These murders occurred following an
altercation that resulted in the stabbing of a white man by a black man in Monroe, Georgia, just
50 miles from Atlanta. Although the black leadership of Atlanta offered a reward for information
about the murders, no one was brought to justice for the crimes. Another potential setback
occurred three years later when the state instituted the Voters' Qualification Act in an overt
attempt to revive legal barriers to African American voting rights. Under this law, voters had to
re-register every four years and correctly answer 30 questions. However, the law was rarely
enforced and was finally repealed two years later because more whites than blacks failed the
literacy test. (Henderson & Roberts, 88)
In spite of these events, black voting strength was actually recharged at the end of the decade by
the formation of the non-partisan Atlanta Negro Voters League (ANVL) led by Dobbs and
Walden and supported by organizations such as the Atlanta Urban League led by Grace Towns
Hamilton (Harmon, 36)
Voting power leads to change in police department
Atlanta's all-white police department presented the black community with two faces: brutality and
indifference. “Police brutality was so familiar,” notes historian Stephen Tuck, “that only a
particularly gruesome or unusual offense made the front pages of the Black Press.” Tuck recounts
one instance in which a 16-year-old African American youth arrested for burglary was tortured
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with a hot iron. (13) Certainly, the fact that many members of Atlanta's all-white police force
belonged to the Ku Klux Klan made such brutality acceptable. Police indifference to “black on
black crime,” as well as their refusal to patrol black neighborhoods, exacerbated the situation.
The high crime rate in many of these neighborhoods reflected these problems.
Throughout this period, Atlanta's black leadership sought to deal with these challenges through
public demonstrations, voter registration campaigns, and soliciting the tactical support of
organizations like the NAACP and the Southern Regional Council. Significantly, a key
demonstration was a 1945 march from Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue to the Atlanta
City Hall organized by the United Negro Veterans. Eventually, black leaders were able to use the
strength of the black vote to bargain with Atlanta Mayor William Hartsfield. Hartsfield refused to
support the hiring of African American policemen in 1945, saying he would listen when black
leaders delivered 10,000 registered voters. The continued strengthening of black voting power
and support from some in the white community — even Hartsfield's new Police Chief Herbert
Jenkins — spurred the Mayor to push for black police officers two years later. Eight African
American police officers finally were hired in 1948. With the help of the African American
community, Hartsfield was re-elected in 1949; support from this constituency also would be
crucial to Hartsfield's future bids for re-election. (Harmon, 27; Torpy, 2003)
The city's first black policemen could not arrest white suspects and, to avoid racial tension at
police headquarters, these officers were initially stationed at the Butler Street YMCA. “But this is
still progress,” said John Wesley Dobbs, who had been fighting for black law enforcement
officers since the 1930s. “And the other will come.” (Pomerantz, 164)
Record numbers of black Atlantans registered to vote during the first phase of the civil rights
movement, and they wielded their voting power in ways that resulted in positive change for their
community. However, these gains were under assault almost as soon as they were realized. The
next section of Atlanta's civil rights history explores this ongoing battle.
Retrenchment and Redirection (1950-1959)
During this phase, the leadership of the civil rights movement in Atlanta had four major concerns:
(1) maintaining black voter strength in the face of the state government's efforts to discredit the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); (2) addressing school
desegregation issues; (3) obtaining housing for Atlanta's growing African American community;
and (4) desegregating the city's public transportation. The tactics of gradualism — backroom
negotiations, compromise, as well as litigation — were the primary means of achieving social
change. Unlike the previous era in which African Americans invited Atlanta's white leaders to
clandestine meetings, white leaders now just as often asked black leaders to such meetings. In
effect, whatever tactical advantage Atlanta's black leaders had obtained through proposing such
meetings was in danger of being eroded when white leaders adopted that tactic.
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NAACP under attack
The climate for organizations active in voter education and registration was tumultuous during
this era. Although organizations such as the Southern Regional Council and the Southern
Conference Education Fund were scrutinized, throughout the South the NAACP was the major
target of investigations. In Georgia, the most vehement attacks were against the NAACP Atlanta
Chapter. While Mayor Hartsfield and Atlanta welcomed the NAACP convention in 1951, Marvin
Griffin, the State Attorney General under Governor Herman Talmadge, spearheaded the
investigations of the NAACP in the city. The attacks continued once Griffin became Governor in
1955.
Taking a cue from the rhetoric and fears of the McCarthy era, one charge was that the NAACP
was subversive and influenced by the Communist Party. The organization also was accused of tax
evasion. John Calhoun, president of the NAACP Atlanta chapter during this period, was
sentenced to a year in prison after refusing to allow the State Revenue Commissioner access to
the organization's financial records. Eugene Cook, Attorney General under Governor Griffin,
stepped up the assault on the NAACP as the state faced challenges to segregated public schools.
Consequently, the state ruled that any teacher affiliated with the NAACP would be permanently
banned from teaching in Georgia. (Tuck, 99) Although the Atlanta NAACP remained open, its
effectiveness was diminished as it attempted to deal with internal problems as well as the external
threats.
Efforts prevent school desegregation
Promises to prevent the desegregation of public schools became a hallmark of the administrations
of three Georgia governors during the decade of the 1950s: Herman Talmadge, Marvin Griffin,
and Ernest Vandiver. White supremacist Herman Talmadge, Governor from 1948 until 1955,
provided the model. When Talmadge was elected Governor, Morehouse College President
Benjamin Mays dismissed suggestions of a mass black exodus out of the state: “Negroes have
been battling things worse than Talmadge since they hit America,” said Mays, later called the
'schoolmaster of the civil rights movement.' “We don't win the fight by running away.” (Allen,
14)
Mays was involved in the legal challenge to segregated schools in Atlanta initially launched in
1950, four years before the landmark United States Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of
Education of Topeka ruled segregated schools unconstitutional. In 1950, the NAACP filed a
federal lawsuit on behalf of 200 African Americans against the Atlanta Board of Education citing
blatant inequalities in the city's black and white schools. Predictably, given the times, that suit
was unsuccessful.
The intended effect of the Brown decision rendered in 1954 was to end public school segregation,
but under Talmadge's leadership, the state passed legislation requiring that public schools be
closed and converted to private schools rather than submit to court-ordered desegregation. Yet
Talmadge also increased funding for public education by 310 percent during his administration;
with some of that allocated to improve African American public schools and salaries of black
teachers. Talmadge, however, was not motivated by altruism, but rather by a desire to justify a
continuation of the “separate but equal” approach to public education. (Allen, 46) Moreover,
despite the funding allocations, black schools in Atlanta still received less money than white
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schools and black teachers continued to be underpaid.
Under Governor Marvin Griffin (1955-1958), the Georgia General Assembly ruled that any state
or local official who spent tax money on an integrated school would be charged with a felony
punishable by two years in prison. Governor Ernest Vandiver (1959-1963) was as adamant as his
predecessors about maintaining segregated schools in the state. When the U.S. District Court
ordered that the state submit a plan for desegregating its public schools by December 1959,
Vandiver promised his white constituency that “neither my child nor yours will ever attend
integrated schools during my administration — no not one.” (Harmon, 111) In the early 1960s,
Vandiver would have to bend to avoid violating the Supreme Court ruling, but as will be noted in
the discussion of the next phase of the Atlanta movement, he did so in a way that caused largely
segregated public schools in Atlanta and other Georgia cities to remain in place until today.
It is important to mention that a number of Atlanta's black leaders did not initially support the
Brown decision. Indeed, although the NAACP called a national meeting in the city and issued the
“Atlanta Declaration” to urge the petitioning of local school boards throughout the South to
desegregate, a lawsuit using Brown as a precedent was not filed in Georgia until Calhoun v.
Latimer in 1958.
Interestingly, a group of African American men led by Alfred “Tup” Holmes (whose nephew,
Hamilton Holmes, was one of the two students to integrate the University of Georgia), attempted
to use the Brown decision to renew their push for desegregating the all-white city golf courses.
The lawsuit, Holmes v. Atlanta, originally filed in 1951 for this purpose, was unsuccessful.
However, after an appeal to the Supreme Court, the district court was ordered to integrate the
city's golf courses in 1955. Ultimately, that suit led to the desegregation of golf courses
throughout the nation. (Tuck 98-100)
Increasing residential communities
The pattern of behind-the-scenes negotiations and compromise by the city's black and white
leaders helped structure initiatives to increase the number of residential communities for Atlanta's
growing African American population during this period. Although job opportunities for African
Americans in white-run businesses and government agencies remained limited, some of Atlanta's
largest companies such as Lockheed and Scripto had begun to hire black assembly line workers.
These employees joined the business women and men of the east side's Auburn Avenue and the
west side's Hunter Street (now Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive) communities, along with school
teachers, ministers, postal clerks, and porters, to comprise a strong black middle class in the city.
These workers needed more and better housing. After World War II, African Americans
represented more than a third of Atlanta's population, noted historian Harmon, but were crowded
into just 10 percent of the developed residential land in mostly sub-standard housing. During the
1940s and 1950s, African Americans who defied the city's tradition of residential segregation by
moving into or near white communities were generally met by threats, physical confrontations,
bombs, and cross burnings.
As early as 1946, the Atlanta Urban League, under Grace Towns Hamilton, had spearheaded the
establishment of the Temporary Coordinating Committee on Housing (TCCH). This committee,
which represented the formalization of the negotiation tactic used to spur social change in the
city, set the agenda and tone for all subsequent efforts to solve the housing situation within the
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framework of segregation. This committee of representatives from the city's black and white
businesses, social agencies, and government, outlined a plan for identifying and purchasing land
for new African American communities, arranging construction of housing on the land, and
implementing the program.
By 1952, the General Assembly followed the Urban League's lead by establishing the
Metropolitan Planning Commission (MPC), which identified areas in Atlanta on which to build
African American housing. Unlike the Urban League's TCCH, however, the MPC was all white.
That same year, Mayor Hartsfield established the biracial, but predominantly white, West Side
Mutual Development Committee (WSMDC) to devise a way to increase black residential areas in
existing communities on the west side with minimal racial upheaval. The WSMDC negotiated an
agreement between African American realtors in the Empire Real Estate Board and the real estate
committee of the Chamber of Commerce to designate residential areas that would undergo racial
transition — from all-white to all-black. The Mozley Park neighborhood, a white community that
had been an area of strong resistance to integration, became a test area of sorts for this racial
reshuffling. Remarkably, through swift, systematic buy-outs of homes in Mozley Park by white
realtors and immediate purchases of the homes by African American families through black
realtors, 737 homes in this community changed hands between 1954 and 1955. A number of
African Americans resented the maintaining of segregated communities and many whites initially
balked at giving up their homes. There also were frequent retaliatory bombings of African
American homes in formerly white communities throughout the decade. (Harmon 63-66)
Nonetheless, the Mozley Park conversion and subsequent community racial transitions were
viewed as successes by most of the architects of the plan.
The bombings of African American homes received little attention from the white media in the
city. However, the October 1958 bombing of the Temple on Peachtree Street, the major Jewish
synagogue in Atlanta, received a great deal of media coverage. It demonstrated that the same
hatred and ignorance that fueled violence against African Americans had rekindled vicious antiSemitism, and could eventually spark brutal attacks on other minorities. Occurring at this
particular time, the bombing also indicated that white supremacists were retaliating against the
Jewish community because the Temple’s Rabbi Jacob Rothchild publicly supported integration.
Desegregating public transportation
The fight to desegregate public transportation in Atlanta met with less overt hostility but no less
formidable opposition. In 1957, in the wake of the successful Montgomery, Alabama, bus
boycott, a group of 100 black Atlanta ministers of the “Law, Love, and Liberation” movement
attempted to challenge segregated seating on local public transportation. Rather than staging a
mass boycott as had been done in Montgomery, only six of the ministers attempted to board a bus
and sit in the area reserved for whites. The six protesters included the Rev. William Holmes
Borders, the pastor of Wheat Street Baptist Church on Auburn and one of Martin Luther King,
Jr.'s role models. The ministers were arrested on state charges. As planned, the Rev. Samuel
Williams, now the head of the city's NAACP chapter, filed a suit in federal court to force the
desegregation of Atlanta's buses and trolleys. Two years later, segregated seating on Atlanta's
public transportation was declared unconstitutional.
Later in 1957, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, and the Rev.
Fred Shuttlesworth, along with civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin, founded the Southern
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Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta. A number of the city's ministers who had
united around the issue of bus desegregation joined this organization. Ultimately, the SCLC
institutionalized the network of ministers engaged in civil rights activities around the country. Its
primary goal was to use nonviolent tactics to help local organizations push for full equality of
African Americans.
1950s lead to direct action
By 1959, Martin Luther King, Jr. decided to move from Montgomery, back to Atlanta. The
strategies and tactics of nonviolent mass demonstrations and boycotts advocated by King and
other leaders of the SCLC paved the way for the next phase of the civil rights movement in
Atlanta, the phase in which direct action rivaled the tactics of gradualism.
Direct Action and Desegregation (1960-1965)
The emergence of the student movement and its use of nonviolent direct action as a tactic to gain
various citizenship rights are key factors that defined this phase. In addition to direct action, the
students' collective leadership style and their focus on encouraging group-centered leadership
among the grassroots of the city were distinctive. Tensions existed among new student activists,
some of the younger adult leaders, and the movement's “old guard. “However, at pivotal
moments, these groups closed ranks and, using the new direct action tactics along with the old
tactics of negotiation and litigation, pushed for the desegregation of businesses, schools, housing,
and health care facilities in Atlanta.
African American power center shifts
Although the Atlanta University Center (AUC) had always played a vital role in the city's civil
rights activities, Auburn Avenue had been the center of power. In the early '60s, however, the
focus of power shifted symbolically from Auburn Avenue to the city's Historically Black
Colleges and University, as a new generation of leaders with new tactics rose up to share the
mantle of civil rights movement leadership.
The shift in the balance of local leadership also was played out in institutions of the city. For
example, it is significant that while the Butler Street YMCA in the Auburn Avenue community
on the east side had been the black “city hall” of local movement activities, Paschal's Restaurant
and Frazier's Café Society — both eateries located on the west side on Hunter Street near the
AUC — became meeting places for local and national civil rights strategy sessions. Such sessions
were increasingly led by students like Julian Bond, Lonnie King, Herschelle Sullivan, Carol
Long, and Ruby Doris Smith, who exemplified the desire to make leadership more inclusive than
was the case among the Auburn Avenue elite. Indeed, the tactic of direct action required the
involvement of a larger group of people than did the backroom negotiations of past eras. The
students outlined their goals and strategies in “An Appeal for Human Rights,” which was
published in the Atlanta papers on March 9 and in the New York Times in the winter of 1960.
Later in 1960, AUC students, supported financially by the Empire Real Estate Board and the
Atlanta Life Insurance Company, established their own movement newspaper, The Atlanta
Inquirer, to counter the conservative stance of the Atlanta Daily World newspaper, which had
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opposed the students' direct action tactics.
Such efforts demonstrate that Movement leaders fully understood the power of the black and
white media to either garner widespread support for the goals of the movement or galvanize
opposition against them. Support came from some unexpected places. Almost one hundred years
before, Henry Grady, editor of The Atlanta Constitution advocated the disfranchisement and
oppression of African Americans. Now, in the 1960s politically moderate Constitution
editor/publisher Ralph McGill often used his daily column to urge racial tolerance and the
inevitability of desegregation.
A small group of southern white liberals contributed to African Americans’ fight for civil rights
as well. For example, Georgia novelist Lillian Smith, who had spoken out against segregation
since the 1930s, praised the nonviolent tactics of the civil rights movement in her 1964 nonfiction book Our Faces, our Words. Frances Pauley had been an advocate of racial desegregation
since the 1940s when she joined the Georgia League of Women Voters. In the 1960s she worked
for school desegregation and as executive director of the Georgia Council on Human Relations,
she encouraged interracial organizing. The efforts of older white liberals provided a precedent for
the involvement of young white students in the Atlanta Movement.
Students begin to lead
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was established on April 15-17, 1960
at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Under the guidance of SCLC's Executive Director
Ella Jo Baker the organization provided a way to harness the energy and idealism of black and
white youth (Mueller, 1993; Carson, 1981). SNCC held its first conference at the Atlanta
University Center on October 14-16, 1960. One hundred and forty delegates from 46 protest
centers in the South attended the meeting. Among those delegates were 80 black student leaders
and white student leaders such as Constance Curry, director of the United States National Student
Association's Southern Project headquartered in Atlanta. Clayborne Carson wrote about the
conference: “SNCC gained permanent status, and its leaders became increasingly confident of
their ability to formulate the future course of the movement. The conference also revealed a
general trend in the protest movement toward a greater emphasis on political issues than on the
religious ideals.” (Carson, 29)
The October 19, 1960, mass sit-ins at lunch counters of Rich's Department Store and seven other
Atlanta department stores was one of the major actions of the student leaders. It was carried out
under the auspices of Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR). Students received
advice from community leaders, such as Whitney Young, Jesse Hill, and Leroy Johnson, as well
as AUC professors Howard Zinn, Robert Brisbane, and the Rev. Samuel Williams. Martin Luther
King, Jr. and students were arrested as they demonstrated outside Rich's. King was transferred to
Reidsville State Penitentiary. In the days after these arrests, John Wesley Dobbs and other
movement elders, who had initially criticized the use of direct action tactics, joined the students'
demonstration at Rich's.
Direct action has an impact
The political implications of the demonstrations and incarcerations were understood and counted
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on by the student leaders. Among other things, direct action was intended to be an object lesson
for the country, a way to instruct America about the contradictory nature of denying basic civil
and human rights to Americans solely because of the color of their skin. As was expected, the
sight of nonviolent black protesters being jeered by crowds of hostile whites flew in the face of
Hartsfield's carefully crafted image of Atlanta as “the city too busy to hate.” Accordingly, the
presidential candidates in the 1960 election were invited to respond to the arrest of Dr. King in
particular. Although presidential candidate John Kennedy did not publicly request that Martin
Luther King, Jr. be released from Reidsville, he did telephone and speak with Dr. King's wife,
Coretta Scott King. This gesture was a basis for Kennedy's campaign description of him as the
“candidate with a heart.” Bobby Kennedy made a strong plea to Judge Oscar Mitchell for King's
release and the following day, he was let go. Republican candidate Richard Nixon ignored the
situation. The intended instructive dimension of the demonstrations was shown when small
groups of white students from Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Agnes
Scott College showed their support for COAHR by demonstrating against segregation. (Harmon,
141) Very soon, hundreds of white students from the North and South would become involved in
direct action initiatives of SNCC, SCLC and other movement organizations. Veteran black
leaders supported the student sit-ins and boycotts by initiating negotiations with the Mayor
Hartsfield and white business leaders of the city.
A Christmas season of significant financial loss for white merchants, because of a boycott by the
black community, demonstrated the economic clout of African Americans in the city. In May
1961, the seventh anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, COAHR students also filed a
lawsuit in an attempt to spur the end of segregation and racial discrimination in all recreational
facilities and public buildings operated by the city of Atlanta. By September 1961, a number of
white merchants desegregated their lunch counters and restaurants, and in 1962, a federal district
court ordered the desegregation of the city’s public pools and parks. (Harmon, 144-148)
Desegregating education
The desegregation of Atlanta's public schools went through several stages in the early '60s, which
epitomized the gradualist approach to dealing with controversial racial issues and which formed
the basis for desegregation efforts in subsequent years.
After a federal court order in 1959 demanded that Atlanta's public schools be integrated
immediately, Georgia Governor Ernest Vandiver recruited an elder member of Atlanta's white
business elite, John Sibley, to head the General Assembly Committee on Schools, which became
known as “The Sibley Commission.” In 1960, the commission issued a report after conducting
public forums around the state to gauge the will of the people. In reality, a primary effect of the
commission's work was to stall for time as the governor sought ways to avoid the quagmire that
would be created if he followed the dictates of state law and shut down public schools rather than
integrate. Personally, Vandiver never wavered in his condemnation of desegregation, calling it
“the most overriding internal problem ever to confront the people of Georgia in our lifetime.”
(Henderson & Roberts, 148)
Organizations like the NAACP, the white group Help Our Public Education (HOPE), and the
biracial coalition Organizations Assisting Schools (OASIS) advocated finding ways to
desegregate so that public schools could stay open. On the other hand, many segregationists
advocated mass resistance and even the closing of public schools rather than integrating them.
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Sibley's goal was to devise a plan to “establish a system of education within the limitations of the
Supreme Court decision, yet one which will secure the maximum segregation possible within the
law.” Echoing ideas from a proposal by HOPE, Sibley created a plan that satisfied many. The
report proposed that the state save separate schools by permitting token integration and giving
local school systems the right to decide whether they would integrate. Specifically the report
suggested: (1) a freedom of association amendment be added to the state constitution to guarantee
each student the right to transfer schools or receive tuition credit for private school if that
student's school was forced to integrate; (2) a second constitutional amendment to offer each
community an opportunity to choose for itself through a local election what to do when faced
with the prospect of desegregation; (3) legislation for tuition grants if a student wanted to transfer
from a desegregated school or if a local school system decided to close rather than integrate.
Sibley adhered to the letter if not the spirit of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, craftily
noting that the Supreme Court did not order the states to integrate their schools, it simply
prohibited them from maintaining laws that demanded schools be racially segregated. (Roche,
162-166)
The integration of the University of Georgia by Atlantans Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton
Holmes early in 1961, however, led the state legislature to strike down its school segregation law
and laid the foundation for efforts to desegregate the Atlanta elementary and secondary schools.
In the spring of 1961 the city's school system received 133 requests for black student transfers.
Only 10 were accepted, and by that fall only nine African American students were allowed to
transfer to previously all-white schools. A decade would pass before a court ordered “majority to
minority” desegregation plan would take effect.
Disagreement about whether to bus students to achieve integration would rage in the early 1970s.
An agreement struck between NAACP President Lonnie King and the Atlanta Board of
Education called “the second Atlanta Compromise” allowed extremely limited busing in
exchange for hiring a black superintendent and more African Americans in top administrative
positions. In time this measure and the movement of whites in large numbers out of communities
when African Americans began to move in, would result in the re-segregation of primary and
secondary schools; most schools in the Atlanta Public School System would then contain a
predominantly African American student population.
Voter registration and other efforts advance
In the early 1960s, Atlanta student leaders and the SCLC continued the fundamental civil rights
imperative of voter registration — particularly in underserved areas like Vine City. This period
also is marked by the coalition of young and elder activists to achieve the desegregation of health
facilities and middle class residential areas in Atlanta. COAHR and the NAACP backed the
efforts of physician Asa Yancey, dentist Roy Bell, and a cadre of other African American health
professionals as they fought to desegregate Grady Hospital. They were joined by white
supporters, such as longtime activist Eliza Pachall, executive director of the Atlanta Council on
Human Relations.
Formally united as the Citizens Committee for Better City Planning (CCBCP), “old guard,”
young adult, and student organizations protested the Peyton Road wall, erected by Mayor Ivan
Allen to deter African Americans from moving into white neighborhoods in southwest Atlanta.
CCBCP successfully demonstrated, negotiated, and litigated for the desegregation of these
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neighborhoods.
To address issues of economic empowerment during this period, SCLC established Operation
Breadbasket, which combined direct action tactics with the negotiation tactics of the previous
years to secure jobs for black women and men. Advised by SCLC co-founder Bayard Rustin and
A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and vice president of the
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), Martin
Luther King, Jr. established relationships with labor organizations. Such relationships laid the
foundation for SCLC's emerging agenda to empower all segments of the country's diverse work
force. In 1961, SCLC also took over the work of the Citizenship Education Program (CEP)
originally developed by Septima Clark, Bernice Robinson, Esau Jenkins, and Myles Horton at the
Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Under the leadership of Septima Clark and Andrew
Young, the CEP became the SCLC's program for politicizing and empowering the black masses
through instruction in community organizing, black history, literacy, and voting rights. (Morris,
236-239)
In previous periods black voting power was used to influence white candidates, rather than to
challenge the white power structure. Now, as a result of state district reapportionment which
empowered black voters, African Americans became viable candidates for the state legislature
and won elections. In 1962, Leroy Johnson won a seat in the State Senate, making him Georgia's
first African American state senator since Reconstruction. In 1965, a record 11 African
Americans were elected to the state legislature, including Grace Towns Hamilton, Ben Brown,
and Julian Bond (of SNCC). White members of the House of Representatives refused to seat
Bond, claiming that he was un-American because of his statements against the Vietnam War.
Bond ran for office and was elected three times. The House voided Bond’s election after each
victory. It would take a federal court order to finally seat him in 1967. The episode was eerily
reminiscent of the efforts of white legislators to keep black legislators out of office during
Reconstruction.
Student leaders play a national role
Student leaders' local organizational efforts provided a foundation for their involvement in two of
the premiere national civil rights activities of this era — the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs
and Freedom and the 1964 Freedom Summer voter education and registration drive in
Mississippi.
Although veteran and student leaders had united to combat local issues in Atlanta, the experience
of John Lewis at the March on Washington demonstrated the schism between the perspectives of
the “old guard” and the “new guard” of the movement. Lewis, the 23-year-old national director of
SNCC, was forced to change his speech to the nation because it was perceived as too militant.
Yet, soon after that, the passage of the 1964 Voting Rights Act affirmed the successes of the
aggressive direct action approach to voter education and registration of the Mississippi Freedom
Summer. Despite that success, the failed attempt of the bi-racial delegation of the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party to unseat that state's all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic
Convention had a far-reaching effect on Atlanta's young activists. John Lewis has said they
realized that “when you play the game and go by the rules, you still can lose…in a sense we were
naïve to go on believing that somehow the Democratic Party in 1964 would have unseated the
Mississippi regular Democrats.” (Carson, 127)
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Violence always a threat
The murders of four young African American girls in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Church
in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963, demonstrated the ruthlessness of the
champions of white supremacy and stunned all in the movement. In 1965, the white backlash
against African American activism continued during the Selma to Montgomery March led by
Atlantans such as Hosea Williams of SCLC and Worth Long of SNCC. There, the nonviolent
marchers were violently attacked by police.
In the wake of such brutal attacks on nonviolent protesters, this period ended with a call for Black
Power and for Black Separatism that was heeded and institutionalized in Atlanta during the next
phase of the movement.
Quest for Black Power (1966-1970)
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)'s attempt to redouble its efforts to
increase activism in inner city neighborhoods was an important aspect of this phase. The
cornerstone of the period, however, was the radicalization of SNCC through its Atlanta Project,
which was an attempt to encourage community control and to fully exploit electoral and
economic opportunities. The goals and tactics of groups and individuals involved in this era were
far more direct and assertive than ever before.
Community organizing takes on new life
Community organizing for improvement of conditions in Atlanta's African American
neighborhoods was not a new phenomenon. However, in the mid-1960s, grassroots leaders
emerged and built on that tradition. SCLC fieldworkers such as James Orange and Tyrone Brooks
used strategies developed in the organizing of rural black communities to help spur activism and
receptivity to SCLC programs within Atlanta's inner city neighborhoods. The voter education,
literacy, and black history programs initiated by the Citizenship Education Program (CEP) were
viewed as major components in that process. The Voter Education Project (VEP) of the Southern
Regional Council supported some of these activities. Later, community organizer Ella Mae
Brayboy implemented innovative programs in the city to specifically empower women to deal
with the challenges of motherhood as well as overcome spousal abuse and unemployment.
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Growth of radicalism
SNCC's Atlanta Project took shape as racial rebellions in the Dixie Hills and Summerhill
communities expressed the frustrations of black youth who felt they had not benefited from the
civil rights movement. Bill Ware directed the Atlanta Project, and the perspectives and goals he
brought to it were a clear departure from the perspectives and goals previously adhered to in the
civil rights movement. The Atlanta Project had a Pan-Africanist orientation, that is, those
involved in this initiative believed that people of African descent spread throughout the world
share a common history, culture, and experience and should work together to bring about positive
change in the world. Unlike SCLC, this group did not place a premium on racial integration and
began to question the role of whites in black organizations. All of these factors were a departure
from the gradualism associated with Atlanta's civil rights history. In time, the Atlanta Project not
only radicalized the Atlanta branch of SNCC, but the entire organization. Significantly, it was
SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael who picked up Atlantan Willie Ricks' call for Black Power
during the 1966 March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi.
The Atlanta Project also provided the basis for attempts to achieve community control in African
American neighborhoods. Vine City offered a proving ground for the community control process.
Student and neighborhood leaders would first assess the problems in the community -- which
might range from inadequate governmental services, poor educational opportunities, a need for
economic development, and issues with the police -- and then the community would be
organized. The organization's efforts, however, were not limited to the specifics of the
community; rather, the Pan-Africanist perspective placed community issues in a global context.
The assessment and the organization were then used as a basis to formulate solutions, which were
often issued as demands, to various public and private entities that had responsibility for the
specific problems. (Carson, 192-198)
The separatist orientation of the Atlanta Project repeatedly ran counter to the national SNCC
leadership. Finally, national director Stokely Carmichael fired or suspended the entire Atlanta
Project staff. Still, in time, the radicalism initiated in Atlanta permeated SNCC nationally. One of
the outcomes of that radicalization was that SNCC provided the foundation for the creation of the
African Liberation Support Committee in the 1970s -- groups throughout the country that had the
goal of supporting African liberation struggles in countries like Angola, Mozambique, and
Guinea-Bissau.
The reconsideration of the role of whites in black organizations was a natural outgrowth of the
nationalist and Pan-Africanist perspective that prevailed during this era. SNCC invited white
members to leave its organization and to concentrate on educating white America about the evils
of racism. This purge created considerable personal and organizational challenges since many
white members of SNCC had literally risked their lives in the cause of civil rights.
Political power grows
The ongoing efforts of Atlanta's black leadership to educate and register black voters were
beginning to pay off in this period. As noted above, in 1965, 11 African Americans won election
to the Georgia legislature. That same year, businessman Q.V. Williamson became the first
African American elected to the Atlanta Board of Aldermen. And, in 1967, Julian Bond was
finally seated as a member of the Georgia House of Representatives. It seemed that African
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Americans in Atlanta had firmly grasped political power.
Assassination of Rev. King and continuing change
Then the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. shook Atlanta and the world in April
1968. Many questioned the political, social, and economic gains achieved over the past three
decades; asking whether they were true victories or just ways to distract and delude African
Americans into believing they finally had achieved equality?
As a new civil rights institution attempted to address such questions, two of the city's oldest civil
rights organizations pushed ahead to keep the movement alive. The creation of the Martin Luther
King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change by Coretta Scott King in 1968 in the wake of her
husband's death became a mechanism for assessing, preserving, and continuing the legacy of the
slain leader and the movement. The NAACP, revitalized by Jondelle Johnson in the early 1970s,
took on the media and won a landmark lawsuit against Cox Enterprises which resulted in more
African American personalities on television screens and more blacks in jobs behind the scenes.
Veterans of the movement who had fought side by side with Martin Luther King, Jr. took the
helm of the SCLC and attempted to navigate the organization through a period of mourning. The
Rev. Ralph David Abernathy became president of SCLC after King's death. Both the Rev. Joseph
Lowery and the Rev. C.T. Vivian also would be crucial to the survival of the Atlanta-based
organization and to keeping it relevant to the broad issues of human rights in America.
The political landscape for African Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s held some
disappointments and affirmations. The election of Lester Maddox as Governor of Georgia (19671971) represented an effort by white supremacists to revive the spirit of segregation in state
government. Four years later, however, newly-elected Governor Jimmy Carter (1971-1975)
declared that the time for racial discrimination had passed. His administration attempted to nullify
vestiges of the image of Georgia as a relic of the “old south” in the realm of civil rights and race
relations. The election of Maynard Jackson as Vice Mayor of Atlanta in 1969 bolstered the spirits
of African Americans in the city. The election of Jackson as the Mayor of Atlanta in 1973 would
make him the first African American mayor in the “deep south” and affirm the fight for black
political strength that had been championed for so many years by his grandfather, John Wesley
Dobbs. Further affirmation of the power of the black electorate was the 1973 election of former
SCLC leader Andrew Young as the first African American Congressman from Georgia since
Reconstruction. Although there was still much to achieve, it seemed the 30-year fight for civil
rights in Atlanta had not been in vain.
Works Cited
Allen, Frederick. Atlanta Rising: The Invention of an International City 1946-1996. Atlanta:
Longstreet Press, 1996.
Archives of Tuskegee Institute. Lynching Statistics in the U.S. 1882-1968.
Banks, Carolyn Long. “Appeal for Human Rights, vII.” AUC Digest Online, March 2000.
Bauerlein, Mark. Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906. San Francisco: Encounter Books,
©2004 Atlanta Regional Consortium for Higher Education / Contact ARCHE at arche@atlantahighered.org
www.atlantacivilrights.org
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2001.
Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening in America. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1981.
Drago, Edmund. Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia: A Splendid Failure. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois. New York: International Publishers,
Inc., 1968.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin Books, (Reprint) 1989.
Harmon, David Andrew. Beneath the Image of the Civil Rights Movement and Race Relations:
Atlanta, Georgia, 1946-1981. New York: Garland, 1996.
Henderson, Harold P. and Gary L. Roberts. Georgia Governors in an Age of Change: From Ellis
Arnall to George Busbee. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988.
Nasstrom, Kathryn L. “Down To Now: Memory, Narrative and Women’s Leadership in the Civil
Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia.” Gender & History, Apr 1999, Vol. 11 Issue 1, p113, 32p.
Morris, Aldon. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for
Change. New York: Free Press, 1984.
Mueller, Carol. “Ella Baker and the Origins of ‘Participatory Democracy’,” In Vicki Crawford,
Jaqueline Anne Rouse, et al, eds. Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and
Torchbearers, 1941-1965, 51-68.
Myrick-Harris, Clarissa. “Against All Odds.” Smithsonian Magazine. July 2002, 70-77.
Pomerantz, Gary. Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: The Saga of Two Families and the
Making of Atlanta. New York: Scribner, 1996.
Roche, Jeff. Restructured Resistance: The Sibley Commission and the Politics of Desegregation
in Georgia. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.
Tuck, Stephen G.N. Beyond Atlanta: The Struggle For Racial Equality in Georgia, 1940-1980.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.
Wells-Barnett, Ida. Lynch Law in Georgia. Chicago Colored Citizens, 1899.
This story of Atlanta’s role in the civil rights movement, along with the accompanying timeline and bibliography, were
written by Clarissa Myrick-Harris, Ph.D. and Norman Harris, Ph.D. of OneWorld Archives. Readers for this material
include Dr. Vicki Crawford of Clark Atlanta University, Dr. Andy Ambrose of the Atlanta History Center, and Brenda
Banks of the Georgia Archives. Editorial changes have been made by ARCHE for purposes of length and style.
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www.atlantacivilrights.org
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